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Fuck this goddamned fuckin’ cold!

So people been complainin’ (Full disclosure: people be complainin’) about the dangers of biking while intoxicated and the legal ramifications of what thereof. While every activity holds its own inherent danger, the risk-vs-reward ratio of a (daintily-unintended) drunken bicycle pub crawl in the Twin Cities is very high. High towards the reward part… um, that’s what I meant (Damn broken delete button!).

First of all, imagine how awesome that would be if you were charged with a BUI/BWI (fictional entities, by the way, cousins of the unicorns) and the courts ordered your bike into slave labor while you had to drive everywhere! OK, that actually wouldn’t be that awesome because you’d be the obvious outcast amongst the bicycle pub crawl posse which is what I’m trying to advocate for here so no, it wouldn’t be awesome. No one wants to rack up oil changes being the accidental makeshift ambulance chauffeur for your lazy biking compadres who get tired and injure themselves and don’t truly know how good they have it. Good thing however is that this scenario will never become mandatory under any of the current state laws. To my current knowledge, which is based off of one state trooper, one substance abuse social worker, but not the fives of people who overrule the professional opinions of the first two people in favor of theorizing their own legal definitions as if this shit’s not written down somewhere, the worst you can get from living life “drink and bike” is a public intox.

Public intox not dangerous enough for you? No worries! There’s cars, other bikes, peoples, road, curbs, owls, the moon, guilt, debt, and buildings all ready to punish you according to their own, sick rules. Helmets. There ya go. Or you could not wear a helmet, fuck it! You’re drunk and that’s not your fault, why should you have to look uncool? Lights! What the fuck’s wrong with you, do you want to die? Get a light! If you’re worried about biking too far and then becoming too tired to bike back, just do the exercise-coping brain trick where you outright focus on hating the pain to where you wanna just fucking strangle it and this should allow you to comfortably bike back home all while mumbling incoherently and draining blood from your eye’s popped socket. A razorblade or a sharp knife also helps convince rubber legs to think twice. Or you could just gauge how far you can go beforehand by biking sober for once (Jesus Christ get your life together!).

For bicycle accessories, I’ve seen folks use little child trailers to carry growlers and such. These people probably cleared out all the baby matter and returned the kids back to their rich, suburban parents from whence they came before using the trailers for their own bummish existences. But if you’re like many well-to-do professionals and you require a constant flow of fresh alcohol running through your veins at all times, you can’t be bothered by bike rides causing down time. For this I’d recommend buying one of these $15 handle bar beverage holders from REI.

It’s pretty fuckin’ simple. Say you do live in Minneapolis. One idea for a route would be the following:

Just get on your bike, go that way, and knock down anything that gets in your way with the exception of breweries, which you will first need to go inside of to THEN knock things down (those “things” being beers). Say you live in some lame town like Lafayette, IN:

Or any town in Iowa:

Let me give you an example where you start at Town Hall Tap in south Minneapolis. While not a brewery itself, the auxiliary location to Town Hall Brewery gives you a reason to include riding the obnoxiously pleasant Minnehaha Trail on your trip. Awesome food, beer, and a patio (the most delicious patio); no growlers but they always have a bunch of great guest taps to keep you there. If you’re totally in love with the Minnehaha Trail and wanna have sex with all the trees like I do, you can take the trail east to Minnehaha Falls then go north up the bike lane-equipped (sigh) Minnehaha Ave to Harriet Brewing. Harriet’s been around long enough to have consistently good beer while it’s “taproom” maintains the cozy nanobrewery underdog feel by literally just being the back of their warehouse (the warehouse door opens up to an outdoor seating area with a great view of downtown). There’s always music and food trucks Fridays and Saturdays along with the bonus of being located next door to a bike shop in case your bike was damaged during all your tree sex having that was incurred on your ride there. After you get sick of noticing how genuinely happy everyone is at Harriet, you can ride east a few blocks to the scenic cocksuck of a trail that clings along the Mississippi river, then take that northwest to the area of Northeast Minneapolis (aka Nordeast, aka NE, aka Sausagetown). Northeast doesn’t really have a biking infrastructure so much as just every driver maintains a ‘nod at me and I won’t hit you’ M.O. on the low speed limit streets so this, obviously, is where you’ll want to do most of your end-of-night, inebriated riding. The area’s abundance of too-new brewpubs provides for constant zig-zagging around the “grid” (or “grid-zagging” as the hip NE residents have been calling it [actually, no one’s been calling it that; I just made that up; not a real term]). Dangerous Man, Indeed, 612, and soon Northgate are all promising new locations in which to shake off the several thousand handmade jewelry peddlers of the local arts scene in addition to sobriety.

Now I know this post seems like a careless disregard of safety for the sole purpose of dropping a bunch of swears but, seriously, the city’s own bike and pedestrian coordinator avidly refuses to wear a helmet in order to demonstrate how safe biking is. Throw caution to your riding partner’s gaseous wind and realize that when it’s your time to get hit, it was because you’re a lame person and uncoolness is like a magnet for cars. Plus, all that exercise will deter the energy that would otherwise force the drunken vomit out of your stomach, through your arms, into your fists, and vicariously onto your wife’s face.